From the Archive

Author Ken Kesey was busy painting flowers on his toilet when police burst into his La Honda mountain hideaway.

Seventeen sheriff’s deputies, a federal narcotics agent and a police dog raided the San Mateo County home on 2½ acres in April 1965, arresting Kesey and 13 associates on marijuana charges. Among those arrested were Beat generation figure Neil Cassady, “Mountain Girl” and several of the Merry Pranksters, famous for their “acid tests.”

Within a few days a Chronicle reporter and photographer sat down with Kesey and his crew at the La Honda compound. Fifty years after the interview and story, The Chronicle’s Peter Hartlaub found a cache of negatives from that mid-1960s visit while searching for photos of beatniks. The headline on an accompanying article: “The Enmity of a Community: Dope raid author’s story.”

Kesey told reporter Jonathan Root in 1965 that the raid was harassment, pure and simple: “I might have found more solitude in the middle of Market Street,” he said. “I don’t like to divide the world into ‘they’ and ‘us’ but people here don’t seem to be able to leave us alone.”

Chronicle coverage of Ken Kesey’s side of the bust at his La Honda home in April 1965.

The “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” author and his friends had been at the La Honda hideaway turning 12 miles of film into a movie chronicling the three-month psychedelic transcontinental trip that Kesey and the Merry Pranksters took to the 1964 World’s Fair on the bus Further. Tom Wolfe would write about the trip in “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” one of the most revered books of the late 1960s.

Kesey would spend five months in jail for the marijuana conviction, and afterward he and his Merry Pranksters would leave the Bay Area for Oregon.

Bill Van Niekerken is the library director of The San Francisco Chronicle, where he has worked since 1985. In his weekly column, From the Archive, he explores the depths of The Chronicle’s vast photography archive in search of interesting historical tales related to the city by the bay.

Bill Van Niekerken is the Library Director of the San Francisco Chronicle. He does research for reporters and editors and manages the photos, negatives and text archives. He has a weekly column “From the Archive”, that focuses on photo coverage of historic events. For this column Bill scans and publishes 20-30 images from photos and negatives that haven’t been seen in many years.

Bill started working at the Mercury News in 1980, when nothing in news libraries was digital. Research was done using paper clippings, and cameras shot film. He moved to the Chronicle in 1985, just as the library was beginning their digital text archive.